The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Graphical displays of data relating to the use or performance of software applications termed “dashboards” have come into wide use. However, traditionally, dashboards are custom-coded as part of a SaaS, desktop or mobile application. Modification of an attribute of the dashboard, such as the type of graphical widget (line chart, bar chart or histogram, for example), usually requires changing code and distributing a new version of the application. As a result, the appearance of the dashboards is relatively static and they cannot easily adapt to changes in the schema or ontology of the data source that drives display of data in the dashboards.
If notifications are provided from the app, they tend to be static as well, and not well connected to the graphical widgets within the dashboard. For example, the typical app notification simply indicates that some kind of change in the app occurred but is not associated with a specific dashboard or widget. Still another problem is that in the context of mobile computing devices, if data changes at a remote server, typically the server must transfer or push the data and the mobile device must determine which dashboard and/or widgets are to be used to render the data. Or, graphical widgets and the data are combined, as in HTML, which requires repetitive large data transfers over network connections that may have low bandwidth or subject to interruption. Therefore, there is a need within these fields for improved computer-implemented techniques for defining graphical data displays and notifications related to them.
While each of the figures illustrates a particular embodiment for purposes of illustrating a clear example, other embodiments may omit, add to, reorder, and/or modify any of the elements shown in the figures.